How to Test Disk Speed

Prerequisites

Before testing disk speed, make sure you have:

• SSH access to your VPS
• Sufficient free disk space for test files

Method 1: Quick Test with dd (Sequential Write)

Connect to your VPS:

ssh hxroot@YOUR_SERVER_IP -p 22

dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync

This writes a 1GB file and reports speed in MB/s.

Expected output:

1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 2.34567 s, 458 MB/s

Method 2: Sequential Read Test with dd

dd if=/tmp/test of=/dev/null bs=1M

Method 3: Random I/O Test with fio (More Accurate)

Install fio:

sudo apt install fio -y

Random read test:

fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=1G --readwrite=randread --runtime=60

Random write test:

fio --randrepeat=1 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --gtod_reduce=1 --name=test --bs=4k --iodepth=64 --size=1G --readwrite=randwrite --runtime=60

Method 4: Using hdparm (Read Speed Only)

Install hdparm:

sudo apt install hdparm -y

sudo hdparm -t /dev/vda

Method 5: Using ioping (Latency Test)

sudo apt install ioping -y

ioping -c 10 /

Interpreting Results

• HDD – 50-150 MB/s sequential, <100 IOPS random
• SATA SSD – 300-550 MB/s sequential, 10k-50k IOPS random
• NVMe SSD – 1000-3000+ MB/s sequential, 100k-500k+ IOPS random
• Good VPS performance should show at least 100-200 MB/s and <5ms latency

Clean Up Test Files

rm /tmp/test